Wisteria Wormwood
"The truth is, there's worse things in life to be cursed with than being Faunus; being able to dream is definitely one of them." Wisteria Wormwood 'is a RWBY fanon character created by Ethan Lewis on March 12, 2016. She is a first year student at Beacon Academy. Her weapons of choice, Asha and Druj, are a pair of heavily-customized Belt-Fed Combat Gauntlets (BFCGs), each fitted with four long, semi-retractable serrated blades. Appearance Slayer Outfit Dubbed the 'Slayer Outfit', when heading into combat, Wisty wears a leather half-jacket with white fur trim around the collar. The jacket has one long sleeve for the right arm and is sleeveless on the left. Beneath the jacket which she wears a small, black top with a pentagram-shaped design that exposes her midriff. She wears an arm-stocking on her left arm in the place of a jacket sleeve. Over this she wears an elbow pad and also a buckled loop and elbow pad on her left arm only. Her belt has two large visible buckles which connect into and secure the ammunition boxes clipped to each hip. Each ammo box bears the same design as the tattoo upon her left shoulder, which is the iconic symbol of the Feral Vigil organization, an underground railroad and activist group for faunus. She also wears a spiked collar around her neck. Wisty wears a pair of black shorts and garter belts clipped to a pair of ripped, edgy-looking stockings. She also wears a thick pair of steel-toed combat boots with platforms that adds between 1-1½ inches to her standing height. In total, Wisteria Wormwood has eleven piercings; these include two in her left caracal ear, three in her left human ear, three in her right human ear, a spike through the left eyebrow, a ring through the left nostril, and a loop through the right-side lower lip. Sometimes, the eyebrow stud is removed. Her hair is dyed a vivid purple and frosted with pink tips. The left side of her head is shaved with a side-cut hairstyle and similarly dyed with a leopard print style pattern. She is particularly athletic and has visible muscular definition, primarily in her abdominal region, shoulders and arms. Beacon Outfit When in her school uniform, Wisty wears black, overknee socks of similar or comparable length to her normal stockings, but these are often ripped and not lined up perfectly with one another, such that each sock visible stops at a different point on each thigh. She also has been known to remove her Beacon blazer and tie it around her waist, opting to roll back the sleeves of the white school blouse up to her elbows. On occasion, she may even substitute the over-knee socks for fishnet stockings. Pajamas Wisty normally wears a pair of black gym-shorts along with a loose-fitting, ripped-up, midriff-and-shoulder-exposing halter top that says ''Kiss My Dust ''on it. Alternatively, she may wear loose-fitting, purple pajamas or kigurumi with a pineapple pattern upon it. Personality Wisty is a strong-willed perfectionist who often demands of the rest of her team the same level of discipline, training and masochistic drive she unleashes upon herself. She is often seen as stubborn, even rude, and is blunt and hyper-critical, sometimes to a fault. While it is obvious that she has a disdain and distrust of authority figures, she respects anyone who demonstrates either wisdom or commendable combat prowess, including but not limited to other Hunters, Huntresses, students and professors alike. It is nearly impossible to persuade Wisteria to do something that she is not keen on doing. It is her rigidly-structured belief system that often makes others follow her lead naturally even though the very idea of either leading a group or being in the spotlight unsettles her greatly. Outwardly, her tough, rough-and-ready, tomboyish exterior is a mask for nearly crippling insecurities, insurmountable anguish and loss as well as a considerable amount of self-hatred and what appears to be post-traumatic stress disorder. This is reflected also in the grueling training regimens she is often seen subjecting herself to. Wisty is also known to have a sweet tooth and fondness for candy which she developed to overcome a former struggle with addiction to a uniquely Faunus drug known colloquially throughout Mistral as "catnip". Abilities and Powers Wisty utilizes an aggressive style of combat which favors medium to close range fighting. Her style of combat resembles a cross between Capoeira, Krav Maga, and Muay Thai. Thus, her fighting style is focused largely on grappling and throws (the aikido and judo influence from krav maga), brutal and aggressive counterattacks, striking with the elbows and knees, short-distance, aerial maneuvers, momentum-building kick work, and disarming opponents wielding weapons. She is both incredibly strong and incredibly durable, evident in her toned physique and by her preference for being a melee fighter, getting down and dirty with her fists. Her sheer, unaided physical strength is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of Yang Xiao Long (sans Semblance). She suffers from an extremely rare physical condition called CIP (Congenital Insensitivity to Pain), which means that she does not directly feel or experience most physical pain. As such, coupled with her semblance, she is often seen wearing bandages, splints, casts, Band-Aids, eye-patches, gauze, and possessing many bruises and breaks. This has led her being thought of or referred to as ''kegadoru ''(meaning "injured doll") in Japanese. Weapons Wisteria’s primary weapons are two identical four-bladed knuckle-dusters called Belt-Fed Combat Gauntlets. They are called Asha and Druj. The former means “truth, order and justice” while the latter means “falsehood, chaos and deceit” in the middle Persian Avestan language, and both words are Zoroastrian concepts with extremely deep and complex meanings. They both represent the duality of good and evil within Wisty with which she is constantly at war spiritually and emotionally. Asha and Druj can be connected to two ammo canisters worn on either hip which feed hot-swappable, dust-based, armor-piercing incendiary tracer (APIT) rounds with the approximate equivalency of a .30-06 Springfield cartridge (7.62×63mm in metric notation) through an ammo belt and servo-hydraulically-operated system with a foreshortened muzzle brake similar to that of a 30 mm Mauser autocannon. A tungsten penetrator has been added to increase both range and velocity, enhancing it enough to pierce through the armor plating of smaller Grimm such as Beowolves and Ursai. A holo-targeting system makes for better accuracy. Because of the condensed nature of the gun mods to the tiger claws, the entire rig has a tendency to overheat quickly, thus it is almost impossible to use the firearm part of the weapon in rapid succession in a fully-automatic capacity, and a burst-fire mode is generally employed instead. It is suggested that Asha and Druj were originally developed in secret as prototypes for the Atlesian military as part of a joint project between Atlas and the Schnee Dust Company, possibly by or for the Atlesian Special Operatives Unit specifically since both a working prototype and the schematics to build them were inside the crate that Adam looks inside during the Black Trailer. The transportation of the weapons had previously been arranged by Winter Schnee, but where the weapons were headed or what the intended use for them originally was remains a mystery. Character History Far to the west in the realm of Mistral, south beyond the great swamps, lies the Emerald Veil, a once glorious kingdom now in decline. It was here, during one of the region's most turbulent times, that Wisteria Wormwood was born. While the Mistral Trade Route brought unfathomable prosperity to the Veil, the Great War brought empire; together, an entire civilization would be tested, forced either to weather the slings and arrows of regressive isolationism or to embrace the winds of change by seeking diplomacy, coinage or dust. In the twilight of an age, Remnant had become a world transformed, and Mistral, with its sprawling, diverse, and mineral-rich landscapes, was no exception. To the world, the Pax Vytalia gave peace and hope; to the children of the Veil, the Chaakhari, it brought uncertainty and darkness. Wisteria the Orphan Like many of her day, Wisteria Wormwood was born a ''bandaka, or orphan. She was born to a Mistralian human noble; her mother, a faunus, had been a prostitute working the upscale brothels catering to specific tastes and clientele that required absolute discretion. When the noble found out that Wisty's mother was pregnant with child, he arranged to have the mother and her child killed in order to prevent his reputation and bloodline from becoming tainted or destroyed. However before he was able to do so, the child was already born, and the then owner of the brothel, a Faunus named Sicario, agreed to take the child and disappear in order to protect it while her mother was secretly shipped across the ocean to escape. Neither mother nor child could ever be allowed to meet, for the history shared between the two potentially poses a great political threat to the seat of Mistralian government, and many agents of Mistral have tried to track down both the mother and her child for years to no avail. Wisteria was then placed in the foster care of a pair of wealthy elite friends known to Sicario. These were lesser nobles who lived in a generally more faunus-tolerant region of Mistral, and the child was named for the stunning lattice of ivy and wisteria that grew along the ancient stone walls and buildings of the Wormwood Estate. Trying to keep the fact that Wisty was faunus a secret as not to stigmatize her, in the early days of childhood, her foster parents did all they could to hide her caracal ears and seek integration with other children her age. Sadly, during a period of particularly harsh faunus purges known as The Long Night, Wisteria's parents were forced to surrender their child to government officials, who took Wisty into the care of the kingdom itself where throughout early-to-mid adolescence she would become systematically abused, physically, mentally, and sexually, until she managed to escape her indentured servitude to the corrupt government of Mistral and enlisted with an underground Faunus Rights group called the ''Feral Vigil ''which, as it turned out, was both founded and run by her mysterious benefactor from childhood, Sicario. Of Vigil and Fang Sicario, having found Wisty once more, vowed never again to lose her and to always protect her to the best of his ability, and he recognized within her a natural aptitude for fighting and physical conditioning. When Wisty was fourteen, Sicario began to train her in ''kahj razar, '''the "cat's paw", in order to defend herself amidst a world of criminals. She studied until she was seventeen when a mysterious figure betrayed Sicario and many of his closest comrades, leading them all into a trap. Sicario and Wisty were the only two that were not murdered, and both were tortured extensively for information regarding the locations and identities of many undercover, senior, or gravely-important Feral Vigil agents. While Wisty never cracked or gave in, Sicario eventually relinquished names and missions resulting in the deaths of dozens of Vigil members. While Wisteria felt utterly betrayed and heartbroken at Sicario's perceived betrayal, Sicario had in fact sacrificed a number of his most trusted officers and most valuable resources in order to throw the mysterious villain off the trail he'd really been searching for, which was whatever happened to Wisty and her mother. Ultimately, this resulted in a crisis of conscience for Sicario who believed that he no longer possessed the means or the power to protect Wisty. Realizing that he was only one of two individuals still alive that knew the truth of Wisty's origin, Sicario paid a powerful huntress to cast a spell on him to block his memory, a powerful ability which left Sicario catatonic and in a vegetative state, but not before he had revealed to Wisty the truth that her birth mother was still alive. All that she was left with was an old, leather-bound diary written by her mother, and a mysterious correspondence to someone called ''The Tin Man ''located at Beacon University in the heart of the nation of Vale. Trivia *Wisteria's given name comes from a genus of flowering plants in the pea family, Fabaceae, that includes ten species of woody climbing vines native to the Eastern United States and to China, Korea, and Japan. The flower is a pale purple color. Her surname, Wormwood, is a common name for Artemisia Absinthium, an ornamental plant used as an ingredient in the spirit absinthe as well as some other alcoholic drinks. *Wisty's weapons, Asha and Druj, are named for dieties or concepts in the Zoroastrian theology of Persia. Asha is the proper name of the divinity Asha, the Amesha Spenta that is the hypostasis or "genius" of "Truth" or "Righteousness" while Druj represents lies, deceit, falsehood and deception. *Chaakhari bears a resemblance to the name of the Maya rain deity. With his lightning axe, Chaac strikes the clouds and produces thunder and rain. Chaakari (চাকরি) is also word in the Bengali language meaning "appointment" or "job". *Wisteria's father, Yemyeşil Nephritunga, is named after the Turkish word for "very green" yemyeşil and the green-hued gemstone nephrite, a calcium and magnesium-rich amphibole mineral actinolite. *The word for orphan or slave in the Emerald Veil is ''bandaka, which was inspired by the Iranian or Babylonian words for slave. During the Achaemenid Period, the most common term to designate slaves in ancient Iran was the word bandaka, a derivative of banda, meaning “bond" or "fetter”. It may also be a reference to Kuh-e Bandaka, one of the highest peaks of the Hindu Kush mountain range in northeastern Afghanistan, since Wisteria often views her life as an 'uphill battle' or 'climbing a mountain'.